Читать книгу The Case for Impeachment - - Страница 17

Like Donald Trump, hardly anyone expected Andrew Johnson to become president of the United States. If Trump seemed destined for stardom in business, young Andrew Johnson, born into poverty and apprenticed to a tailor at the age of ten, seemed destined to sew buttons and cut cloth for the rest of his days. What Johnson lacked in sophistication he compensated for in ambition, grit, and bravado. With help from his wife and customers at his shop, he first learned to read and eventually became a compelling speaker who had a say-anything style that confounded the conventional politicians of his time.

Johnson scratched his way up the sand hill of Tennessee politics as a Democrat in the early and middle years of the nineteenth century. He eventually became a United States senator in 1857. Johnson campaigned as the champion of the common people of America, who he said the political elites of his time had scorned and ignored.

Four years later, Johnson’s political career seemed over when the nation plunged into civil war. Seven southern states, threatened by the election of Republican president Abraham Lincoln on a platform opposed to the expansion of slavery, seceded from the Union before his inauguration. The Civil War began when Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and in June, Tennessee seceded, becoming the last of the eleven states of the Confederacy.

As a slaveholder who upheld the sanctity of the federal union, Johnson was the maverick of his time, and he was the only senator in a seceding state who refused to resign his seat and join the Confederacy. Although Union predictions of a quick victory proved false and the war would grind on for four bloody years, Johnson’s exile was short-lived. In February 1862, Union troops captured Nashville, Tennessee, making it the first Confederate state capital restored to the Union. Republican president Abraham Lincoln rewarded the loyal “war Democrat” Andrew Johnson by appointing him governor of Tennessee.

Two years later, Lincoln dumped his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, and put his prized Democrat, Andrew Johnson, on his reelection ticket in a show of national unity. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln spoke of how the great and bloody war was a divine retribution for slavery, visited upon a guilty people both north and south. If the bloody war “continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,” he declared, “and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ” His new vice president, Andrew Johnson, listened, but failed to comprehend the profound implications of Lincoln’s words.¹²